"Sure enough, a product listing provides a lot more detail about the tiny Chrome OS desktop than Samsung gave us in January, including its use of a 1.9GHz, dual-core Celeron B840, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 16GB solid-state drive and six (not five) USB ports. We haven't seen mention of the promised wireless keyboard and mouse bundle, although the retailer's configuration might reflect a stripped-down trim level: at $330, it's a lot less than the $400 we were quoted at the start of the year." A $400 ChromeOS desktop box? Good luck with that.

Those who speak ill of ChromeOS machines and think they aren't worth it have never tried one. No matter what laptop/desktop you compare it to, ChromeOS is faster... The boot and awake response times are amazing. While I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro, MacOS is a dog sometimes (like connecting to my work Wifi sometimes just messes it up). ChromeOS machines connect to wifi without problems all the time every time.

Yes, they are a little pricy, but with automatic updates, you don't have to pay for OS updates and while my Chromebook runs Ubuntu as well, ChromeOS is just smoother when doing internet things.

Also, it's a little short sighted to discount them as well, cause everything is moving to the cloud (including enterprises -- who google is targeting with these devices).

Uh wrong, all the Chromebooks where overpriced crap using very outdated surplus Atom hardware with the worst possible chipset/IGP, the Pineview chipset, with the GMA 3150 which is only 2 fixed function Pixel Pipelines at only 200Mhz with OpenGL2.1 support and only MPEG2 acceleration in hardware.

If they had used something more modern like at least a 5.9w AMD Z-01 APU http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bobcat/AMD-Z%20Series%20Z-01.... which would have been at least 2x more CPU grunt, a real dual core 64 bit CPU and something like 4x the GPU performance as well as full acceleration of every format up to H.264 all with much lower power consumption so the battery life would have been better.

The hardware was never up to the task that the target market wanted to do with them, their Youtube vids pegged the CPU, if they wanted to play any browser games the best they could hope to play is QuakeLive, anything heavier would max out the GPU.

People want something that can handle full HD video and play HTML5 WebGL games at a bare minimum and anything more then around $300 for something cat can only do just that is just too much since for $50 more you can get decent hardware that can handle those tasks and many more since they come with a full blown OS.

Also, "the cloud" is a lie, trusting your data to an advertiser's server is just as dumb as trusting their OS and Browser to not send them every little thing you've ever typed on the damn thing, as someone else stated, they should be paying you to use them since they're going to sell the data.